Are you hearing the voice of the customer?

By Timo Selvaraj

In our fast paced multi-screen marketing world, hearing the voice of your customer without any distractions or noise in a crystal clear mode is difficult or in some cases outright impossible. Combining your customer touch points and aggregating the voices into one coherent stream for any actionable insight is a challenge. Your customer touchpoints may include the following channels: support emails, product surveys, phone calls, website/app visits, chat sessions and personal visits to a store/branch. All of these interactions are mostly unstructured where the customer is speaking to us. Can we capture the voices from these disparate sources? Are we capturing some but losing most in transmission or translation? Words mentioned by the customer speak louder than the numbers provided through ratings. Here are a couple of ways to start capturing the customer voices for our marketing, branding and product development initiatives.

#1 Numbers provide direction but Customer words/comments provide Voice

Based on the customer ratings or scaled values (1-5 etc.) we can draw averages or bucketed counts on satisfaction or dissatisfaction. However the “Why” something is off putting for a customer is typically provided from mining their comments/themes. Manual mining of customer themes for categorization and theme extraction is very cumbersome, and is a time consuming process for larger datasets. Are you getting your customer’s directional feedback or customer’s true voice? Customer voice is made evident in text information and not just in numbers.

#2 Open-ended comments are the most challenging for Analysis

While numbers can quickly be crunched with Excel or Tableau for your “typical” analysis and conclusions, working with the comments are always challenging. Comments have to be categorized and also grouped into the right themes and context. For example, grouping comments together by location, could provide insight into why 1 location may be having a specific problem with poor morale or bad customer service. Deeper review and slicing of the comments could reveal that this may be happening only during certain shifts or under a control situation. While the numbers may provide the low score, text analysis will reveal the actual cause of the score.

#3 Predicting the customer voice through active listening

Customer experiences define the customer voice and whether it is good or bad. We are constantly challenged with active listening with the customer coming through many channels. Active listening can help with predicting what the customer voice will be when we have a defined pattern or theme of voices tied to experiences. If customers are providing a positive review on a specific day for a store on a continuous basis, it can be attributed to any number of reasons but until we establish an active listening practice within the organization, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for the positive customer voice.
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SearchBlox can establish an active listening process for your organization through our text analytics platform and provide continuous insights for creating a positive customer voice.

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